Electroweak and QCD corrections to Higgs production via vector-boson fusion at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper presents next-to-leading order calculations of QCD and electroweak corrections for Higgs production via vector-boson fusion at the LHC, including all relevant diagrams and interferences, with results implemented in a Monte Carlo generator.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive calculation of NLO QCD and electroweak corrections for Higgs production in vector-boson fusion, including all diagrams and interferences, and implements these in a Monte Carlo tool.

Findings

QCD corrections validate previous approximations for VBF cuts.

Electroweak corrections are comparable to QCD, around 5-10%.

Corrections cause distortions in distributions up to 10%.

Abstract

The radiative corrections of the strong and electroweak interactions are calculated at next-to-leading order for Higgs-boson production in the weak-boson-fusion channel at hadron colliders. Specifically, the calculation includes all weak-boson fusion and quark--antiquark annihilation diagrams to Higgs-boson production in association with two hard jets, including all corresponding interferences. The results on the QCD corrections confirm that previously made approximations of neglecting s-channel diagrams and interferences are well suited for predictions of Higgs production with dedicated vector-boson fusion cuts at the LHC. The electroweak corrections, which also include real corrections from incoming photons and leading heavy-Higgs-boson effects at two-loop order, are of the same size as the QCD corrections, viz. typically at the level of 5-10% for a Higgs-boson mass up to \sim 700 GeV. In general, both types of corrections do not simply rescale differential distributions, but induce distortions at the level of 10%. The discussed corrections have been implemented in a flexible Monte Carlo event generator.